“Your conscience will be your undoing, boy,” Carlo had jeered at him more than once. “It makes you weak.”
As long as it didn’t make him Carlo, he thought now, bitterly. Perhaps that was the most he could hope for.
Elena had no clue what she was dealing with. No possible clue what he held in check. “You don’t have the slightest idea who I am.”
“The entire world knows who you are,” she retorted, glaring at him as if he’d never been anything but a monster, and he couldn’t stand it. Not any longer. Not from her. “You’re—”
“I am so tired of paying for the sins of others,” he gritted out. He slashed a hand through the air when she opened her mouth and she shut it again, sinking back against the lounger, her hands in fists at her sides. “I’ve spent my life doing nothing but the right thing, and it still doesn’t matter. Yes, I was going to marry that girl.” He raked a hand through his hair. “Because it was my grandfather’s dying wish and I am many things, Elena, none of them as polluted or as vile as you seem to believe, but I could not defy my own grandfather.”
“Your grandfather—” she began, her eyes flashing, and he knew what she was about to say. The stories she was about to tell. His twisted family history in all its corrupt glory.
“Was no saint,” he interrupted her. “I know. But he was my grandfather, Elena, and whatever else I might think of the way he lived his life, I have him to thank for mine. How do you repay that kind of debt?”
“Selling yourself off to the highest bidder is an interesting answer to that question.”
“You’re one to talk,” he retorted, and she sucked in a breath, her face going white, then flushing deep red.
He hated himself for that, but that was nothing new, so he kept going—as if he could explain himself to her. As if she might understand him, somehow. How sad was that? How delusional? But he couldn’t seem to stop.
“The docklands project that the wedding was supposed to secure would have done what years of struggle on my part couldn’t—assure the Corretti family’s legacy into the future, legitimately. Bring all the warring factions of the family together.” He searched her face. “How could I refuse to do something so important? Why would I? I was prepared to do my duty to my family, and I can’t say I wouldn’t do it again.”
But she was shaking her head, and she even let out another laugh that seemed to pierce him through the chest, leaving only an icy chill in its wake.
“I’ve heard all of this before,” she said, shrugging. “The struggle to be a good man, the weight of the family name, the call to duty. It’s like a song and I know all the words.” Her gaze slammed into his, and he was amazed to find it felt as if she’d used a fist instead. “But when Niccolo said it, I believed him.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
NICCOLO FALCO. AGAIN. Always.
“Your beloved Niccolo is a liar and a crook,” Alessandro said through his teeth. “He wouldn’t know the right thing to do if it attacked him on the streets of Naples, and he certainly wouldn’t do it. Don’t kid yourself.”
She got to her feet then, stiff and jerky, as if she thought she might break apart where she stood. “I would never lower myself to a Corretti scum like you,” she’d hissed at him on that dance floor, and he’d believed her then.
He didn’t know why he wanted so badly not to believe her now.
“Is this what you meant by real, Alessandro?” she asked in a harsh whisper, her bright eyes ablaze. “Are you satisfied?”
“It would be so much easier to simply give in,” he threw at her, his voice unsteady. As if he’d lost control of himself, which was unacceptable, but he couldn’t stop. “To simply be the man everyone thinks I am, anyway, no matter what I do. Even you, who shouldn’t dare to throw a single stone my way for fear of what I could throw back at you. Even you.”
She sucked in a breath, as if he really had thrown something at her.
“Because there could be no one lower in all of Italy.” Something in the way she said it ripped at him, or maybe that was the way she looked at him, as if he’d finally managed to crush her—and he detested himself anew. “Not one person lower than me. Yet you can’t keep your hands off me, can you?”
“You know exactly what kind of man Niccolo is,” he said then, because he couldn’t handle what her voice did to him. What that look in her eyes made him feel. “You’re here at his bidding, to do whatever dirty work he requires. And it’s certainly been dirty, hasn’t it? But you sneer at my name?”
“I am here,” she threw back at him, her voice still so ragged and her eyes so dark, too dark, “until we discover whether or not our recklessness results in a pregnancy neither one of us wants. We risked bringing a brand-new life into all of this bitterness and hate. That’s the kind of people we are, Alessandro.”
“Why don’t you teach me,” he said then, his gaze on hers, hot and hurt and too many other things he couldn’t define and wasn’t sure he wanted to know, though he could feel them all battering at him.
“Teach you what? Manners? I think we’re past that.”
“You’re the expert on men like me,” he said, fascinated despite himself when she blanched at the way he said that. “You know all about it, apparently. Teach me what that means. Show me. Help me be as bad as you think I am already.”
Something shifted in the air between them. In her gaze. The way her blue eyes shone with unshed misery, and the way she suddenly looked so small then, so vulnerable. So shattered.
And all he felt was … raw. Raw and ruined, all the way through to his bones.
Or maybe that was the way she looked at him.
“Let me guess what makes me the perfect teacher,” she said, her voice cracking.
“You tell me, Elena,” he said, his own voice a low, dark growl. “You’re the one in bed with the enemy.”
And she swayed then, as if he’d punched her hard in the gut. He felt as if he had, a kind of hot, bitter shame pouring over him, almost drowning him. But she steadied herself, and one hand crept over her heart, as if, he realized dimly, it ached. As if it ached straight up through her ribs, enough for her to press against it from above.
“I can’t do this anymore.”
Her voice was thick and unsteady, and he had the impression she didn’t see him at all, though she stared right at him. Her eyes were wide and slicked with pain, and he watched in a kind of helpless horror as they finally overflowed.
“I don’t …” She shook, and she wept, and it tore him apart. And then her uneven whisper smashed all the pieces. “I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
Alessandro reached for her then because he didn’t know what else to do. Elena threw her free hand out to stop him, to warn him. Maybe even to hit him, he thought—and he’d deserve it if she did. He did yet another thing he couldn’t understand, reaching out and lacing his fingers through hers, the way he had on that dance floor long ago. She shuddered, then drew in a harsh breath.
But she didn’t pull away, and something in him, hard and desperate, eased.
“I can’t breathe anymore,” she whispered, those tears tracking down her soft cheeks. He felt the tremor in her hand, saw it shiver over her skin. “I can’t breathe—”
He pulled her to him, cradling her against his chest as if she was made of glass, the need to hold her roaring in him, loud and imperative and impossible to ignore. She bowed her head into him and he felt the hand she’d held against her own heart ball into a fist against the wall of his chest.
He ran his free hand down the length of her spine and then back up. Again and again. He found himself murmuring words he didn’t entirely comprehend, half-remembered words from the long-ago nannies who had soothed his nightmares and bandaged his scrapes as a boy. He bent his head down close to hers and rested his cheek on top of her head.
She shook against him, silent sobs rolling hard through her slender body, and he held her. He didn’t think about how little sense this made. He didn’t think about what this told
him about himself, or how terrified he should be of this woman and the things she made him feel. And do. He simply held her.
And when she stopped crying and stirred against him, it was much, much harder than it should have been to let her pull away. She stepped out of his arms and dropped his hand, then scrubbed her palms over her face. And then she looked up at him, tearstained and wary with a certain resolve in her brilliant blue eyes, and something flipped over in his chest.
“I’m not a whore,” she said, something naked and urgent moving over her face and through her remarkable eyes as they met his. “I’m not engaged to Niccolo. I ran out on him six months ago after he hit me, and I’ve been hiding from him ever since.”
He only stared at her. The world, this island, his house, even he seemed to explode, devastating and silent, leaving nothing but Elena and the way she looked at him, the faint dampness against his chest where she’d sobbed against him and what she’d said. What it meant.
She was not engaged. She was not a whore. She wasn’t a spy.
It beat in him, louder and louder, drowning out his own heartbeat.
“I’m risking everything I care about to tell you this,” she continued, and he heard the catch in her voice, the tightness. The fear, he thought. She’s afraid. Of me. “The only things I have left. So please …” She choked back a sob and it made him ache. It made him loathe himself anew. “Please, Alessandro. Prove you’re who you say you are.”
“A Corretti?” He hardly recognized his own voice, scratchy and rough, pulled from somewhere so deep in him he hadn’t known he meant to speak.
She crossed her arms, more to hold herself than to hold him off, he thought. She took a deep breath. Then her chin lifted and her blue eyes were brave and somber as they held his, and he felt everything inside of him shift. Then roll.
“Be the man who does the right thing,” she said, her voice quiet. And still it rang in him, through him, like a bell. Like a benediction he couldn’t possibly deserve. “Who does his duty and would again. If that’s who you are, please. Be you.”
“Come,” Alessandro said in a hushed voice Elena had never heard before.
She was so dazed, so hollowed out by what had happened, what she’d done, that she simply followed where he led. He ushered her out onto a small nook of a terrace that jutted out over the water, settling her into the wide, swinging chair that hung there, swaying slightly in the soft breeze.
“Wait here,” he told her, and then walked away.
She couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to, she realized. She drew her knees up onto the bright white seat and leaned back. The chair swung, gently. Rocking her. Soothing her the way his hand had, warm and reassuring along her back as she’d cried. Down below, the rocky cliff fell steeply into the jagged rocks, and the sea sparkled and danced in the afternoon sun, as if everything was perfectly fine. As if none of this mattered, not really.
But Elena knew better.
She’d betrayed her family and her village and every last thing she’d clung to across all of these months, and yet somehow she couldn’t seem to do anything but breathe in the crisp air, the scent of sweet flowers and cut grass in the breeze.
Almost as if she really believed she was safe. Almost as if she thought he was, the way she always had. When she suspected the truth was that she was simply broken beyond repair.
Alessandro returned with a damp cloth in his hand and when he squatted down before her his hard face was so serious that it made her chest feel tight. She leaned forward and let him wash the tears from her face. He was extraordinarily gentle, and it swelled in her like pain.
He pulled the cloth away and didn’t move for a moment. He only looked up at her, searching her face. She had no idea what he saw.
“Tell me,” he said.
It was an order as much as it was a request, and she knew she shouldn’t. Her mind raced, turning over possibilities like tavola reale game pieces, looking for some way out of this, some way to fix what she’d done, what she’d said, what she’d confessed….
But it was too late for that.
This was the price of her foolishness, her selfishness. First Niccolo had tricked her, and then this man had hurt her feelings, and she was too weak to withstand either. Now that her tears were dry, now that she could breathe, she could see it all with perfect, horrifying clarity. She hadn’t kept her village or her family’s legacy safe the first time, and given the opportunity to fix that, she’d failed.
Because he thought too little of her, and she couldn’t stand it.
She was more than broken, she thought then. She was a disgrace.
“Tell me what happened to you,” he said then, carefully, again so very gentle that her throat constricted. “Tell me what he did.”
He rose and then settled himself on the other end of the swinging chair, one leg drawn up and the other anchoring them to the floor. His hard mouth was in a firm line as he gazed at her, his dark green eyes grave. For a moment she was thrown back to that ballroom in Rome, when she’d looked up to see a stranger looking at her, exactly like this. As if the whole world hinged on what might happen next.
Which she supposed it had then. Why not again?
“I’m from a long line of very simple fishermen,” she said, pushing past the lump in her throat, concentrating on her hands instead of him. “But my great-grandfather eloped with the daughter of a rich man from Fondi. Her parents begged her to reconsider, but she refused, and they decided it was better their daughter live as a rich fisherman’s wife than a poor one’s. They gave my great-grandfather her dowry. It was substantial.”
She pulled up her knees, then wrapped her arms around her legs, fully aware that this was as close to the fetal position as she could get while sitting up. And she fought off her sense of disloyalty, the fact that she should be protecting this legacy, not handing it over to man who was perfectly capable of destroying it. On a whim.
But she didn’t know what else to do.
“He was a proud man and he didn’t want their money,” she continued, swallowing back the self-recrimination. “But my great-grandmother convinced him to put it toward a big stretch of land along the coast, so her family need not be as dependent on the whims of the sea as the rest of the village. And the land has been handed down ever since, from eldest son to eldest son.”
She looked past him then, out toward the water, as if she could squint hard and see all the way across the waves to the remote little village she was from, tucked up in its rocky hills so far away. She could imagine every rock, every blade of grass, every tree, as if she was standing there now. She knew every house that clung to the hillside, every boat in the harbor. And most of the faces, too.
“It must,” Alessandro said quietly, “be worth a great deal more now than it was then.”
Elena should have thanked him, she thought, her eyes snapping back to his, for reminding her where she was. And who he was. She wasn’t sharing this story with him—she was gambling everything on the slim possibility he was a better man than she thought he was. She nodded.
“It is,” she said. “And my parents had only me.”
“So the land is yours?” he asked, his brows lifting.
“My father is a traditional man,” Elena said, looking down the sweep of her legs, staring at her feet against the bright white cushions. Anywhere but at Alessandro. “When he dies, if I’m not married, the land will be held in trust. Once I marry it will transfer to my husband. If I’m already married when he dies, my husband will get the land on our wedding day.”
“Ah,” Alessandro said, a cynical twist to his lips when she looked at him again. “You must have been Niccolo’s dream come true.”
“Last summer my father was diagnosed with a brain tumor,” she told him, pushing forward because she couldn’t stop now. “There was no possible way to operate.” So matter-of-fact, so clinical. When it had cast her whole world into shadow. It still did. “The doctors said he had a year to live, if he was lucky.”
She hugged herself tighter, guilt and shame and that terrible grief flattening her, making it hard to breathe.
“About a month after we got the news, I was walking home one evening when a handsome stranger approached me, right there in the street,” she said softly.
Alessandro’s lips thinned, and he muttered something guttural and fierce in Sicilian. He looked furious again, dark and powerful, like some kind of vengeful god only pretending to sit there so civilly. Only waiting.
“Do you want to hear this?” she asked then, lifting a hand to rub at the pressure behind her temple and only then realizing that she was shaking. “All of it?”
“I told you,” he said, a kind of ferocity in his voice, all that ruthlessness and demand gleaming in his dark green eyes. He touched her then, reaching over to tuck a wayward strand of her hair behind her ear, that hard mouth curving when goose bumps rose along her neck, her shoulder. “I want everything.”
And Elena understood then that she was open and vulnerable to this man in ways she’d never been before. This really was everything. This was all she had left inside of her, all she’d had left to hold, laid out before him because she’d finally given in. She’d finally let go. This was everything lost, her whole world ruined, and nothing left to hope for but the possibility of his mercy.
This was surrender. Everything else had been games.
“I didn’t think I was particularly naive,” she said then, because he was looking at her in that too-incisive way of his, and she was afraid of what he might see. And of what he might do when she was finished. “I’d been to university. I have a law degree. I was starting to take on all the duties and responsibilities of the family business. The land. The money. The constant development proposals.” She shook her head, scowling at her own memories. Her own stupidity. “I wasn’t just some silly village girl.”
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